Book 49: The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson

I had heard about this book last spring, and I was super excited to read it after having been to Spain for the first time last year. It's set in Granada in the final days of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada before Isabella and Ferdinand ousted the Muslims in 1492. The story follows Fatima, who is a concubine of the Sultan in the Alhambra, and a mapmaker named Hassan, who are both of interest to the Inquisition and flee together. The Bird King refers to a poem they told each other while living in the palace, and which gives their flight direction. They are aided by a djinn, who helps them escape and follow a path to the sea, and a Catholic monk, whose loyalties are always unclear.

I loved Fatima and Hassan's friendship, and the way they interact with each other. I also loved how the book engaged with narratives, and the ways that cultural imperialists not only control the day to day lives of their subjects, but also what they dream of, and the stories they tell each other. It was an interesting book to read after A Memory Called Empire, because of how they each approach this kind of cultural mythology, and how to create a new myth of reality. It made me want to read more of this era of Europe, and to seek out more stories told from the point of view of the Islamic empires, rather than how they were "reconquered." A really lovely read.

Grade: A 

Book 48: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

This is a book that examines how we use language on the internet, and specifically, how it's different from past usage but not actually as completely all new and original as we'd like to think. It looks at how the internet (and social media in particular) creates a public, informal form of writing that's much closer to how we speak than more formal writing is, but that is actually quite connected to how we've always used written language in more informal settings. It views this through the lens of our internet age, which is both a matter of our literal chronological age, but also involves when in the internet life cycle we became fluent (or didn't) in online writing formats and standards.

I really enjoyed this book because it's one that's written about what I think of as my culture by someone who, to me, actually gets it. The result is a book that feels both extremely familiar and almost intuitive and also deeply satisfying, because it acknowledges a thing that I feel to be true and explains how it happened and why it's true. The overlap with the study of codeswitching, and the way people tailor their language to their audience, often unconsciously, is also really interesting to me, because there never used to be an assumption that how we communicate in one setting needed to be the way we communicate in all settings. The attempt by Facebook and other online corporations to codify people as having one identity, one story about themselves, and most importantly, one way of telling that story, broke down because no one actually behaves like that in any reality. The book was a very nice blend of new information and new ways of looking at things I already knew, sometimes without consciously knowing I knew it.

Grade: A